by CD Reiss
No matter what she said, McNeil-Barnes Publishing was in good shape.
Its owner and president? Less so.
“You don’t need me.” I didn’t think she’d believe me, but it was the truth.
“How can you say that?”
“Listen to me. Breathe and listen. You have this.”
“I don’t finish things.”
“Yes.” My hands slid to her shoulders. “Yes, you do. I won’t let you fall. But I won’t let you undermine yourself either.” I pointed at her seat. “You’re going to move that desk so the window is at your back. You’re going to sit framed in the city like the queen you are. You’re going to take Lloyd’s stuff and go through it. You’re going to respectfully pack what you have to keep and throw away what you don’t. Then you’re going to run the shit out of this place. By yourself. You were born for this. And me. You were born for me.”
She bit her lip. Consternation or arousal? Both? It didn’t matter, because I’d broken through the fear for the moment. We slid our arms around each other.
“I don’t need a pep talk, Steinbeck.”
“What do you need?” I grabbed her ass so hard she let out a sharp ah of pain.
“That.”
She was so hungry for it. In the past month, she’d been willing, but I’d been too wrapped up in my own doubts. I hadn’t seen how right she was for what I had to offer. Sex tangled with violence and I fisted her hair, settling her into my cock as it hardened.
“I was too easy on you yesterday,” I said in her ear.
“Yes, sir.”
“Take off my belt.”
I held her head so she couldn’t see it, leaving her fumbling for the buckle. Having her so uncomfortable, trying to please me despite what I was doing to her, excited and calmed me at the same time.
She got the leather belt through the loops.
“Very good.” I took it and let her hair go. It stayed knotted in the back, a reminder that I’d controlled her. “Are you wet?”
“Yes.”
“Prove it. Touch yourself and show me.”
She made short work of her fly, unbuttoning and unzipping in seconds, getting her hand down in there as if it was her job.
She held up her slick hand, trying to staunch a smile. I brought her fingers to my lips and tasted her juice. Then, because I suddenly had no self-control at all, I kissed her so I could christen her mouth with it. I tasted every corner, touching her deepest crevices with my tongue. I wanted to make sure every soft surface she had knew I owned her.
Taking the belt, I pushed her against the window, pressing my body against hers.
“I liked working with you,” she said when we separated to catch a breath.
“You made me crazy.” I pushed my erection against her until her lids fluttered.
“You loved it.”
“Regardless. I’m punishing you for it.” I stepped back and pointed at the window. “Face New York.”
She turned to face the window. The people walking up, down, across, around the street looked like boats on a currentless grey sea. Across the way, the windows of the office building sat in silent witness.
“Let me see your ass.”
She hooked her thumbs in her waistband. I made a plan for the perfect ovals of her bottom if last night’s marks were gone. Another plan for a series of light pink welts, and yet another if it turned out she was still bruised and red. All involved pain and pleasure. All were meant to satisfy her need to forget herself.
I slapped the belt against my palm when her pants were halfway down, and in response, a sharp knock came from the door.
Her head whipped around to look at me even as her bottom remained in my direction.
“Who is it?” I called.
“Hi. Hey. It’s me? Kayti. Have you seen Diana?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Officer… um… the hot one wants to see her? They got the security tapes.”
I looked at her, still bent but without the look of anticipation. I knew the moment had been stolen from us.
“I better take this,” she said. When I nodded, she stood straight and called to the door, “One minute, Kayti.”
“We’ll reconvene tonight.” I put my belt back in the loops.
“My place or yours?” She pulled her pants up and fastened them.
“Ours.”
She smiled for a second then looked at her father’s desk. The sadness wasn’t there, but something more businesslike. I didn’t know exactly what she was thinking, but I had a clear sense of what she was feeling, and it wasn’t fear or hopelessness. They’d be back while she grieved for Lloyd, but she had a handle on it.
“You’re not getting the condo for free.” She went for the door. “I earned it fair and square. Now you have to earn it back.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes. I demand one hour. Tonight. If you can make me pinochle out in one hour, you get your half of the loft back.”
I’d missed her. I didn’t realize how much. “If I do, I’m moving back in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the car,” I added.
“Forget it. Go get the Mustang off blocks.”
She opened the door wide enough for me to see Kayti, who smiled like a schoolgirl. She practically jumpy-clapped when she saw me, then she fell into line behind her boss, who walked to meet Officer Gareth like the world’s only badass.
How was I going to get a woman like that to safe out?
Chapter 50
It took me fifteen minutes to get back to the R+D office. I spent fourteen of them devising ways to push Diana’s limits while staying within my own. I had a few ideas, but they’d take more than an hour. My wife was stubborn. If she knew she only had to last an hour, she’d last an hour. Then she’d demand more and more opportunities to sign over the loft. Each time, her limits would expand and the game would get harder to win.
I didn’t care about the deed to the loft. I had plenty of property.
I cared about winning the game for our mutual benefit. I wanted to live with her.
“You look chipper today,” Eva said, all in red as I came through the back entrance.
“First day of the rest of my life, et cetera.”
“Does that have anything to do with the long-stemmed rose in reception?”
Odd. Why would Diana send me a flower? I could use it later on her body, certainly, but it wasn’t her place to make suggestions.
“Have Britt leave it on my desk.”
“Not a real flower.” Eva’s words stopped me as I tried to walk off. “Don’t be so literal.”
I knew who she was talking about before she’d even finished the second sentence. “Thanks, Eva. And no.”
We walked toward my office together.
“No?”
“I’m not chipper because of her.”
“That’s almost an answer to a personal question.”
I texted the receptionist on our messenger service.
—Send her in—
“I’ll give you one more question,” I said without thinking. And fuck it, because I loved making her smile that wide.
“Can I save it?”
“Save it and you get interest.” I held up two fingers as I got behind my desk.
“Two questions? Please. No more. I’ll die of happiness before I can make a list.”
“Don’t die. I need you.”
“Now you’re getting mushy. I’m leaving before you embarrass yourself.”
“Thank you.”
She passed the long-stemmed rose on her way out. I’d been right. It was Serena in black slacks and sage-green polo shirt. Even Eva turned to look at her when they passed. My ex-sub usually walked around as if she was well aware of that fact that she was the most beautiful woman in the room. She moved with precision when she walked down a runway and when she kneeled and opened her mouth for a cock. She spent her life striving for aesthetic perfection and came close to achieving it.
It was
boring as hell, but that wasn’t my problem. I didn’t have to live with her.
“You can close the door,” I said.
When she did, I held my hand out to the chair on the other side of my desk. I had a perfectly serviceable couch, but I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea. By checking on her so often, I’d already given her enough reasons to think I wanted her.
She sat in the chair and crossed her legs so that one of her feet hit the floor, resting sideways in her stiletto, and the other stretched to the side of the chair. Her crossed legs were not decorous and demure. She was tense and engaged. Purposeful, yet somehow fragile.
“What brings you?” I asked.
“I know something.” She played coy, adding a sheen of seduction to her expression, running her finger along the crease of her pants. “I thought you’d like to know too.”
“Maybe. Depends on what it is.”
She broke into a self-conscious smile. “This seems silly. I didn’t ask how you were. Didn’t tell you what a nice office this is.”
“It’s just an office. It’s for business.”
She cleared her throat and turned back into a sophisticated supermodel in the blink of an eye. “Of course.”
My hands were folded on the desk. I tapped my thumbs together. “You said you had something to tell me?”
She uncrossed her knees, letting the cross fall to her ankles. “I had an experience the other night. When you were kneeling in front of your ex-wife?” More than the knowledge that she’d seen me kneel, I bristled at ex-wife. “Stefan saw it. It inspired him.”
“To what?”
“Kneel.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Yeah. The exact same thing. After you left.”
I didn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d gotten on my knees for Diana in a moment of unbearable pain. I knew Stefan loved Serena, but apparently I hadn’t known how much. “What did you do?”
She cleared her throat and lifted her chin, making eye contact. “I was shocked. I was anxious. It turned everything upside down, but he wouldn’t get up. He’s a very stubborn man.”
“Apparently.”
“Then something changed. I felt kind of… gratified… from the inside out, instead of the outside in. And that… well, there’s no other way to put it. I got turned on. Very turned on. I couldn’t keep my eyes open.”
“Ah.” The pieces clicked together in my mind.
“It’s not like he was there for twenty minutes. The whole thing took seconds.”
People evolve. Sexual urges and needs can be unlocked at different life stages. Stefan and I hadn’t seen Serena’s inner Domme because she wasn’t ready, or the Dominant side didn’t exist. Had this side of her been conceived in Montauk? Or before? Or had she been gestating for years? And did it matter?
“I don’t know, but subbing hasn’t been working for a long time. It doesn’t feel right anymore. When I heard you were back and you’d been vanilla all those years, I thought I could try it. You wanted to try it with me and I rejected you. But when Stefan kneeled, I knew vanilla wasn’t what I needed.”
She was all balls. I was proud of her on the one hand. On the other, I couldn’t leave the door open half an inch for her, or she’d burst through and insist I train her as a Domme.
“I can’t help you explore this, Serena.”
“I know, I know. But I’ve had three masters, three real ones I care about, in my life. You’re one of them. I want your blessing.”
“That’s very submissive of you.”
“Do you want me to kneel for it?” She raised an eyebrow, as if the prospect had appeal despite everything she’d said. But the expression also had a tinge of a dare, as if she was the one in control.
“No.” I stood. “You have my blessing and my encouragement.”
Her grin was worth ten thousand dollars. Literally. “Thank you!”
“Now you can top from the top.”
We shook hands as equals. I didn’t realize we hadn’t been equal in my mind, but until I showed her out, she’d been a pest or a toy. That guilt was on my shoulders, not hers. Not the community’s. I knew in my head that the sub was an equal partner, even though they gave up power.
I’d been operating under some kind of delusional fog.
Had Diana cured me of it? Only the fear of her being beneath me had driven me away. I could never see her as anything less than an equal. Had Serena just been the proof of the truth as I came to know it? How many more years of loneliness and upside-down thinking did Diana save me from?
Thank God for her. Thank God for her a million times.
Chapter 51
How do you break a masochist? If receiving pain is part of their identity, how do you cause so much pain they forget who they are? Reveal their secrets? Bare themselves to you?
One hour.
I didn’t want the loft anymore. I did. I wanted a life with her inside that loft or outside of it, but the loft was ours. It was us. And there was no us without the truth.
Once I decided to trust her with submission and then trust myself with her self-determination, the resistance washed away like years of caked-on dirt because I loved her. I’d give her anything she wanted, but not without letting her enjoy the fight.
She kept a mug of pens on the bar, next to stacks of paper and business cards she’d never get to. I picked out a pen, made sure it worked, and put it in my pocket. She was mine, and her body was going to announce it.
I was snapping the last of the blackout drapes closed when I heard her keys jingling outside the door. I shut off the last lamp. The loft went black.
The darkness was cut by an arrow of light from the hall. I grabbed her wrist before she could flip on the hall lamp.
“Close the door,” I said.
She did, and I clicked the deadbolt.
“Hello to you too,” she said to the sound of her bag falling on the floor.
My watch glowed when I touched it and beeped when I set it. “One hour.”
“Yes, sir.”
I was in the same darkness she was, but I’d been in the loft for a couple of hours. The darkness was mine. I knew where everything was. So when I stepped away from her, I knew where to go.
“Strip down. Quickly. Then put your hands behind your back and stand with your feet apart. Close your eyes.”
Her clothes rustled and her boots clonked on the hardwood. When the rustling stopped, I flicked on a very small, very powerful flashlight and pointed it in her eyes. She put her hand up to block it, a porcelain statue in a dark room.
“Ow, hey.”
“Close your eyes or you’re going to be punished in a way you don’t like.”
She scrunched them tight. I shut off the flashlight, took her by the wrist, and put her hand behind her back. She gasped with arousal.
“Your safe word?”
“Pinochle. But forget it. I’m not saying it.”
A silver cuff set that looked like two intertwined rings sat by the coats. I crisscrossed her wrists behind her back and snapped it closed around them. “The Jag says you’re wet already.”
“I’m not taking that bet.”
I put a black velvet hood over her head and tied it around her neck to keep her eyes from adjusting. “Do you know where the credenza is?”
“Yes.”
I smacked her ass hard. The darkness seemed to echo the sound more than the light ever did. “Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That was for forgetting.” I smacked her ass again. “That’s for not closing your eyes.” Again and again, I felt her ass give under my hand and the sharp clap of pain. “For not keeping your hand behind your back. For trying to make deals, and three more just because you love it.”
Smack, smack, smack. She was already panting. I held her up so her knees wouldn’t buckle under her.
“The credenza,” I said. “There’s a window to the left of it. Can you walk to it?”
“Yes, sir.” She took a step.
“Go then.”
She stepped toward the kitchen, which was nowhere near the credenza, and yelped in pain. “What…?”
“You said you wanted children. I’m giving you a taste of it. Keep walking.”
“I don’t… ow!”
I put the flashlight at her feet. The black Lego brick was stuck to the bottom of her foot. She rubbed it against her knee, and it clacked and bounced on the floor.
Letting the flashlight run up and down her body, I soaked in her submission. Hands behind her back, off balance, fighting every painful step as she tried to avoid the bricks I’d covered the floor with. She was the picture of ungainly, awkward, unsexy obedience. It was the most arousing thing I’d ever seen.
She bumped into the back of the couch and growled in frustration. “Which direction am I facing?”
I smacked her ass.
“Sir. What direction?”
I put the flashlight on her face. I couldn’t see her expression past the hood, just the bottom of the fabric going concave, convex, concave with her heavy breaths. Her chest heaved, nipples like pebbles. I put my hand between her legs, and she opened them for me, squeaking when she stepped on a Lego. Soaked. Her arousal was dripping inside her thigh.
“I’ll tell you on one condition.”
She groaned. I pinched her clit. A long N sound came from beneath the mask. That was new.
“Okay,” she gasped, rotating with my finger, “what’s the condition?”
“You get there on your knees.” I slid two fingers inside her, hooking the fingers until I found the bundle of nerves just inside. She cried out. Back to vowels.
“There’re these things on the floor all the way there?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a sadist.”
I touched her nose through the hood. “Correct.”
“Or you won’t tell me which way I’m walking?”
“Nope.”
She turned her head right, where she’d bumped into the couch, then left, where she’d started. She was calculating where she was, and if she managed to do that, she’d find her way too easily and we’d have no fun.